GeForce RTX 3080 Ti to continue Nvidia's mining limiter strategy

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Multiple sources point to ETH throttling tech in all future GeForce RTX 30 graphics cards.

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Read more.

I think Nvidia already announced it would apply to future cards, so not much of a revelation there. However, new Ti cards all based on GA102 and with only 12GB VRAM is interesting, if very disappointing.

Part of me suspects this will become a hardware feature in the next generation or two.

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Originally Posted by philehidiot

Part of me suspects this will become a hardware feature in the next generation or two.

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Problem is, how can you differentiate ETH hashing from any other gCompute feature like F@H etc.?
Or even some future complex shader program in a game?
I'm sure Nvidia would love for anyone who needs compute to buy a more expensive card, whereas even if CUDA is crippled to half-rate people teaching themselves about it should still be able to run their stuff, albeit slowly.

While I understand WHY they are doing this, I disagree with it entirely, if you buy a card you should be able to do what you want with it..

The bit I'm more interested in, is will these new cards come in FE models or will they all be AIB, chances are by the time I can actually get a 3080FE the Ti might be out which could be a tastier option..

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Originally Posted by kompukare

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Originally Posted by philehidiot

Part of me suspects this will become a hardware feature in the next generation or two.

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Problem is, how can you differentiate ETH hashing from any other gCompute feature like F@H etc.?
Or even some future complex shader program in a game?
I'm sure Nvidia would love for anyone who needs compute to buy a more expensive card, whereas even if CUDA is crippled to half-rate people teaching themselves about it should still be able to run their stuff, albeit slowly.

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ETH is easy to detect - the algorithm used needs at least 4gb for starters to run well which is why it's used on gpu's rather than asics. Unless they rewrite ETH it's pretty much slam dunk for miners - and they have a card for miners if you want to mine...

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Originally Posted by [GSV]Trig

While I understand WHY they are doing this, I disagree with it entirely, if you buy a card you should be able to do what you want with it..

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You can do what you want with it. You just need to write your own signed BIOS and modify the drivers if you want full rate ETH hashing. It's no different than games having paid DLC or operating systems limiting their hardware support.

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Originally Posted by badass

You can do what you want with it. You just need to write your own signed BIOS and modify the drivers if you want full rate ETH hashing. It's no different than games having paid DLC or operating systems limiting their hardware support.

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Sure, because that's simple and easy ;)

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Originally Posted by kompukare

Problem is, how can you differentiate ETH hashing from any other gCompute feature like F@H etc.?
Or even some future complex shader program in a game?
I'm sure Nvidia would love for anyone who needs compute to buy a more expensive card, whereas even if CUDA is crippled to half-rate people teaching themselves about it should still be able to run their stuff, albeit slowly.

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From a video i watched it seems to reduce hash rates over time so short stints probably wouldn't be effected to much, IDK how something like F@H would be effected as IDK how different that is from crypto mining.

EDIT: Found it, it was an article on VideoCardz.com.

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Originally Posted by badass

You can do what you want with it. You just need to write your own signed BIOS and modify the drivers if you want full rate ETH hashing. It's no different than games having paid DLC or operating systems limiting their hardware support.

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Just don't use any of Nvidia's firmware or software as the EULA is quite strict about using consumer grade cards in a "data centre". That last term was not defined last I checked and so you have to wonder if a small business which works with fluid dynamics has a room, in a house, with server rack, cooling and multiple GPUs and storage systems - is it possible Nvidia with a grudge could call that a data centre?

Whatever, it still won't be possible to buy one for anywhere near msrp, once they all get hoovered up by the scalpers.

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Originally Posted by [GSV

Trig;304]While I understand WHY they are doing this, I disagree with it entirely, if you buy a card you should be able to do what you want with it..

The bit I'm more interested in, is will these new cards come in FE models or will they all be AIB, chances are by the time I can actually get a 3080FE the Ti might be out which could be a tastier option..

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The problem will be solved in time through more manufacturing capacity as we are currently in the midst of a semi conductor shortage due to a range of issues.

This is why a number of powers are attempting to craft long terms plans for semiconductor fabrication facilities closer to home, as TSMC has over 50% of the worlds entire production.

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Originally Posted by Kato-2

The problem will be solved in time through more manufacturing capacity as we are currently in the midst of a semi conductor shortage due to a range of issues.

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As long as miners believe the cards are worth more in a rig than the purchase cost, there is an infinite market at stupidly high price. No amount of manufacturing capacity can outrun that.

The mindset seems to be "If I pay another $100 I just have to mine another month to get my money back" with a certainty that they will get their money back.

Also, after the last crash where Nvidia and AMD had cards on their hands that took ages to shift there probably isn't any real appetite to feed the miners again.

Thank you, we can then end up getting more affordable prices as well, I do get why the miners want these popular cards though from both Green and Red team, because of the easy sell value in general, if need to get out or cut losses.

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

Also, after the last crash where Nvidia and AMD had cards on their hands that took ages to shift there probably isn't any real appetite to feed the miners again.

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Nvidia alone shipped over $175 Million RTX cards straight to miners when they launched.
AMD and Nvidia have both been selling straight to miners. They're in the business of making money.
Given the countless things to mine aswell. Restricting just Etherium isn't going ot change much.

https://wccftech.com/nvidia-allegedl...pus-to-miners/

Sorry but 12GB memory is just pathetic on the high end of gpu's which may be used for more than just gaming.... now I understand not doing the full 24 of the 3090 but 12GB is hardly an upgrade over the 3080 (lets be honest the 3080 SHOULD have had 16GB), made even worse with AMD doing 16 min on the high end.

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Originally Posted by AC81

Nvidia alone shipped over $175 Million RTX cards straight to miners when they launched.
AMD and Nvidia have both been selling straight to miners. They're in the business of making money.
Given the countless things to mine aswell. Restricting just Etherium isn't going ot change much.

https://wccftech.com/nvidia-allegedl...pus-to-miners/

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There must have been warehouses full of unsold 8GB RX570 cards after the last mining crash, which was awesome while they were down at £130 level. So yeah, selling direct to miners I'm sure is a thing, but it looks like crypto is crashing already so pumping up the manufacturing seems unwise.

From watching a video earlier it seems more than Eth is hobbled by the card, but they did find things that were profitable to mine. Fingers crossed it makes enough of a difference.

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

From watching a video earlier it seems more than Eth is hobbled by the card, but they did find things that were profitable to mine. Fingers crossed it makes enough of a difference.

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Out of curiosity... any 'professional' things like vray, encoding and or davinci resolve affected from what you can remember.... it wouldn't be a shock for nvidia to do it to push users towards quadros

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

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Originally Posted by AC81

Nvidia alone shipped over $175 Million RTX cards straight to miners when they launched.
AMD and Nvidia have both been selling straight to miners. They're in the business of making money.
Given the countless things to mine aswell. Restricting just Etherium isn't going ot change much.

https://wccftech.com/nvidia-allegedl...pus-to-miners/

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There must have been warehouses full of unsold 8GB RX570 cards after the last mining crash, which was awesome while they were down at £130 level. So yeah, selling direct to miners I'm sure is a thing, but it looks like crypto is crashing already so pumping up the manufacturing seems unwise.

From watching a video earlier it seems more than Eth is hobbled by the card, but they did find things that were profitable to mine. Fingers crossed it makes enough of a difference.

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Pumping up the production, makes it more difficult for the miners to get some of their money back by selling the cards that they got, and can even end getting losses, especially if mining collapses... as I fail to see what value you get other than huge powerbills.

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Originally Posted by kompukare

Problem is, how can you differentiate ETH hashing from any other gCompute feature like F@H etc.?
Or even some future complex shader program in a game?
I'm sure Nvidia would love for anyone who needs compute to buy a more expensive card, whereas even if CUDA is crippled to half-rate people teaching themselves about it should still be able to run their stuff, albeit slowly.

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Would it take much of a stretch for Nvidia to utilise those Tensor Cores for limiting mining activity on the entire chip in the future? I'm sure they could if they chose to do so.

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

There must have been warehouses full of unsold 8GB RX570 cards after the last mining crash, which was awesome while they were down at £130 level. So yeah, selling direct to miners I'm sure is a thing, but it looks like crypto is crashing already so pumping up the manufacturing seems unwise.

From watching a video earlier it seems more than Eth is hobbled by the card, but they did find things that were profitable to mine. Fingers crossed it makes enough of a difference.

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That's the real problem, they're only limiting one crypto currency, if they were really serious they would also be targeting others as well?

Specs mostly in line with the 3090 makes me sad. 3080FE fits in my rig and I was fortunate enough to get one. This is presumably going to be the same size at the 3090.

If there's a 3080Ti FE and the mining lock works, there's a slim chance I could land one and sell my 3080 to some miner to pay for it. But I can be pretty sure it won't fit.

No I don't want a new case.
No I wouldn't do that to those of you still trying to get a 3080.

I find the 12 GB VRAM figure doubtful if only because the competition - the RX 6900 series - has 16 GB VRAM.

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Originally Posted by LSG501

Out of curiosity... any 'professional' things like vray, encoding and or davinci resolve affected from what you can remember.... it wouldn't be a shock for nvidia to do it to push users towards quadros

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It was a video by "Red Panda Mining", so he wasn't bothered by doing anything useful or even fun with the card, just hash rates.

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Originally Posted by QuorTek

Pumping up the production, makes it more difficult for the miners to get some of their money back by selling the cards that they got, and can even end getting losses, especially if mining collapses... as I fail to see what value you get other than huge powerbills.

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My recent reading of mining threads has been very interesting, if somewhat disturbing. I would rate the expected resale value expected by some miners of their cards firmly into "delusional" as it is. More manufacturing makes more cards to be snapped up by the miners who often seem to be taking out massive loans to pay for their 8 x 3090 rigs at scalper prices, so I don't see simply making more cards as helping the gaming community.

I have been doubtful that Nvidia's mining limiter was harsh enough, thinking it needed to drop mining rates by something like a magnitude to really work. But there do seem to be people incensed by the limiter, and saying that they will never buy another Nvidia card ever again after what they obviously see as slight and betrayal of their just cause. Sadly I suspect their greed will win out and they will purchase again, and this is just more hot air from a community which are masters of heating air ;)

A 12GB 3080 variant is the easiest to produce - it just needs chips with all 12 memory controllers working and the PCB already has 12 positions for DRAM with only 10 currently used. The 3090 is double sided and 16GB may come in the future but needs a completely new chip.

All production will switch to the mining limiter including 3080 after a certain date - but it wont be retrospective

So the people getting FE for £649 early on did very well - its still impossible to get now and the later you buy the nearer you are to next years model.

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

I have been doubtful that Nvidia's mining limiter was harsh enough, thinking it needed to drop mining rates by something like a magnitude to really work.)

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They're not harsh enough... Certainly.
But, i wouldn't say the amount of cut is the isssue. They're limited enough to the point where they're by no means real money earners.
The issue still remains that they are only limiting Etherium.
There are dozens of other things to mine. So, if a miner can get hold of these cards, they're still likely too. After all, mining some of the other cryptocurrencys makes sence.
You don't want to have all your eggs in one basket given the volitility of cryptos
Some of the smaller currencys are likely to be worth significant amounts. A bit of a gamble yes. But who'd have predicted Etherium would pass £1.3K.
As the popularity of others rise, which they are beginning too. Limiting just etherium isn't a valid solution to keeping the cards away from miners.
Monero is up nearly $200 from 10 months ago. Zcash up $100.

Hang the miners.
Hang the bots.
Hang the scalpers.

I would say hang the code out loud too, but as a former sailor it might have severe repercussions for me :mrgreen:

The IMPORTANT question is:-

Will it also continue Nvidia's avalailability strategy?
Because if so, this card may never see the light of RGB inside someones PC!

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Originally Posted by AC81

The issue still remains that they are only limiting Etherium.

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Not from the videos I had watched, it looked like most were impacted. So that's a good start, but not enough.

The problem is you only need one thing that is profitable, and there was one already. I'm sure others will follow. Heck, when Bitcoin went ASIC only for mining part of the surge of altcoins was creating things that were hard to dominate with the power efficiency of ASICs for compute (who wants efficiency eh?). With that background, I could almost see someone creating an altcoin targetting the 3060 workload.

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

Not from the videos I had watched, it looked like most were impacted. So that's a good start, but not enough.

The problem is you only need one thing that is profitable, and there was one already. I'm sure others will follow. Heck, when Bitcoin went ASIC only for mining part of the surge of altcoins was creating things that were hard to dominate with the power efficiency of ASICs for compute (who wants efficiency eh?). With that background, I could almost see someone creating an altcoin targetting the 3060 workload.

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Redpandamining did a video where he tested the 3060 mining a number of different cryptos.
He's goes on to say in his results he thinks 3 are effected.
There's still money to be made there. These are still viable crypto mining cards. You just have to choose what to mine.
Watch from 9:40 for a bit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QlXQyPZEME

Certainly, conflux gave him a good margin.

I read raven coin mines well on 3060 and have seen s few people with 3060s on their mining rigs

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Originally Posted by AC81

Redpandamining did a video where he tested the 3060 mining a number of different cryptos.

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I had seen it, but had mis-interpreted the results. Have now had the time to go look at his spreadsheet, and picking over the details I can see plenty of miners buying the 3060. Perhaps with the 3080ti Nvidia will widen the scope of the crypto nerf. But if they only knocked out one crypto hash each time they release a new GPU, we will be well into the 4000 series before it has an effect.

I'm certainly not seeing shelves full of 3060 cards yet, though TBF if the crypto nerf was successful there is probably so much pent up demand from normal users that they would probably be sold out.

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

I'm certainly not seeing shelves full of 3060 cards yet, though TBF if the crypto nerf was successful there is probably so much pent up demand from normal users that they would probably be sold out.

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Yes, everyone is making out like all the shortage is due to miners, but judging from the very self-selecting Steam survey plenty of gamers have 3000 series cards so there is availability. (Radeon 6000 is less available but then it released later and is competing with consoles swallowing up so much of 7nm capacity.)

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Originally Posted by kompukare

Yes, everyone is making out like all the shortage is due to miners, but judging from the very self-selecting Steam survey plenty of gamers have 3000 series cards so there is availability. (Radeon 6000 is less available but then it released later and is competing with consoles swallowing up so much of 7nm capacity.)

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Oh some are trickling through to the usual end users, but I think the rage against mining is quite understandable. Each mining rig is 6 or 8 cards, so each happy miner is at the pain of quite a few normal users. If i thought crypto currency was long term viable it wouldn't be so bad, but the moment quantum computing comes of age all private keys become as good as public and the $40 in my crypto wallet are as good as gone. So the ecological disaster of cypto strip-mining is good for what?

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Originally Posted by kompukare

Yes, everyone is making out like all the shortage is due to miners, but judging from the very self-selecting Steam survey plenty of gamers have 3000 series cards so there is availability. (Radeon 6000 is less available but then it released later and is competing with consoles swallowing up so much of 7nm capacity.)

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Steam survey accurate? Erm.....nope
But I am still hearing that other countries (brexit cough) have done far better than us here in the UK for supply

My point is more along the lines that I don't trust all the PR about Nvidia coming to save gamers, and that none of the shortage is due them cheapening out with Samsung's 8nm, or needing GDDR6X.
Still, they could easily turn the narrative to consolers vs PC gamers. At least for GDDR6 supplies.

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Originally Posted by AC81

Nvidia alone shipped over $175 Million RTX cards straight to miners when they launched.
AMD and Nvidia have both been selling straight to miners. They're in the business of making money.
Given the countless things to mine aswell. Restricting just Etherium isn't going ot change much.

https://wccftech.com/nvidia-allegedl...pus-to-miners/

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You know that whole rumour being touted as fact comes from one site nobody had ever heard of, and they put the article behind a paywall. Chances are Nvidia sold nothing directly to miners, and that site was just trying to get a few more $$$.

Yeah. I Understand that 12 GB Memory is just pathetic on the high of gpu's. yeah right 12 GB is hardly an upgrade

Yeah, I understand about that 12GB memory high and not upgrade

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Originally Posted by Dribble

You know that whole rumour being touted as fact comes from one site nobody had ever heard of, and they put the article behind a paywall. Chances are Nvidia sold nothing directly to miners, and that site was just trying to get a few more $$$.

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When Linus covered the story. He said he'd heard before that AMD and Nvidia are delivering straight to the larger miners. So, it's not from one scource.
So, there's some wiggle room with the figure... But, it certainly looks like it has been happening and on a large scale.